Broadband Benefits for Economic Growth

“While broadband enabled technologies have clearly brought tremendous economic benefits, the benefits have not reached enough businesses, communities and American workers. Ensuring innovation flourishes across all aspects of the broadband system—broadband networks, devices, and applications—is crucial to the future of the country. The FCC will partner with businesses, including women-owned and minority-owned enterprises, as well as investors and entrepreneurs from all backgrounds to support a flourishing digital economy, and ensure that all Americans can enjoy the benefits of broadband opportunity.”

“We're at a point where high-speed access to the Internet is critical to the ability of people to be successful in today's economy and society at large,” said Larry Strickling, head of the National Telecommunications and Infrastructure Administration (NTIA), part of the U.S. Department of Commerce.

Economic opportunity. Broadband can expand access to jobs and training, support entrepreneurship and small business growth and strengthen community development efforts. The plan includes recommendations to:

Support broadband choice and small businesses’ use of broadband services and applications to drive job creation, growth and productivity gains.

Expand opportunities for job training and placement through an online platform.

Integrate broadband assessment and planning into economic development efforts.

- Executive Summary, National Broadband Plan

Recruiting workers to live here, work remotely: It’s clear that our world has changed dramatically. Telecommunications connects us in very interesting, exciting, and productive ways.

Many jobs will be directly affected by the growth of information processing technology.

Any information-based job can be conducting using cyber work tools.

Most white-collar work can be turned into a cyber-job.

The expanding Internet has caused a shift in business behavior. Nowhere is the change more exciting than for the local rural economy.

The emergence of the Internet, as a cheap infrastructure resource, changes job cost structure. Distance is now measured in bandwidth connection speeds.

The “new economy” is having a profound impact on employment. Working in Cyberspace is a job opportunity that rural workers can and should exploit.

What is Cyber Economic Development? Cyber is a prefix that means information processing via telecommunications. More people now work and play via the Internet. Cyber has come to describe any web-based activity. For example, Cyber Economic Development (CED) means to foster and promote local economic development, via the cyberspace. In more specific and practical terms, it means working via the Internet. If we have local people with cyber skills relocate to a rural community they can now work for companies anywhere in the USA or worldwide. In doing, they export their time and import cash with their monthly salary being spent in the local economy.

Example:

Consider a cyber-smart person in a rural town in South Dakota who has learned how to work via the Internet. They could be a manager, writer, graphic designer, education, researcher, engineer, etc. Any information-based job can be conducting using cyber work tools. Most white-collar work can be turned into a cyber job.

The cyber-skilled can now relocate to most rural South Dakota communities and work for any company in the USA that desires Software Developers. The employment of that person is no longer limited by the lack of Software Developer jobs in the rural South Dakota community.

In the cyberspace, where you live does not matter. What you know is all that counts. If the South Dakotan gets a job as a Software Developer with a Boston based company then the entire local economy will benefit. Cyber-worker development is a great way to add jobs to any rural community that has the proper bandwidth requirements.